How can it be December already? There are so many books that I want to read, especially with all those ‘best of’ lists popping up everywhere (see Largehearted Boy’s ‘best of’ aggregator). I’ll see what I can do with the rest of this month, but with in-laws visiting and all the festivities, I’m not sure how December will go!

Deborah Harkness exploded onto the literary scene with her debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, Book One of the magical All Souls Trilogy and an international publishing phenomenon. The novel introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and the handsome geneticist and vampire Matthew Clairmont; together they found themselves at the center of a supernatural battle over an enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782.

Now, picking up from A Discovery of Witches’ cliffhanger ending, Shadow of Night plunges Diana and Matthew into Elizabethan London, a world of spies, subterfuge, and a coterie of Matthew’s old friends, the mysterious School of Night that includes Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh. Here, Diana must locate a witch to tutor her in magic, Matthew is forced to confront a past he thought he had put to rest, and the mystery of Ashmole 782 deepens.

Deborah Harkness has crafted a gripping journey through a world of alchemy, time travel, and magical discoveries, delivering one of the most hotly anticipated novels of the season.

Spy novels aren’t really my thing so we’ll see how far I get with this one!

The Riddle of the Sands: a Record of Secret Service is a classic early example of the espionage novel, with a strong underlying theme of militarism. It has been made into a Hollywood film and TV film.
As a novel it owes much to the adventure genre, and perhaps more significantly, it was a spy novel that established a formula that included a mass of verifiable detail, which gave authenticity to the story – the same ploy that would be used so well by John Buchan, Ian Fleming, John le Carré and many others. Ken Follett called it “the first modern thriller.” The Observer, in a list published to coincide with the Big Read campaign in 2003, listed the book at number thirty-seven in “The 100 Greatest Novels” from the past 300 years.

Quite enjoyed the first book. Hope this will be good too. Interesting to note that it seems to focus on a new character?

Six years after The Giver, Lois Lowry ushered readers back into that mysterious but plausible futuristic world to tell the story of Kira, orphaned, physically flawed, and left with uncertain prospects. Like The Giver, Gathering Blue challenges readers to imagine what our world could become and how people could evolve.

It feels like an awful long time since I read Empire Falls and having started on Nobody’s Fool already, I’m quite pleased by it thus far.

It is Thanksgiving in North Bank and Sully, old Miss Beryl’s feckless lodger, does not have much to be thankful for. His arthritic knee is acting up and so is his truck; his ex-wife is at the end of her tether, his mistress is giving him the cold shoulder, and the grinning ghost of his father won’t leave him alone. The future looks bleak when Sully’s son Peter, a morose college professor, returns, offering Sully a chance to address a lifetime of neglected responsibilities and threatening his carefree existence.